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Introduction to Program Synthesis

Lecture 1: Introduction and definitionsThe dream of automating software development has been present from the early days of the computer age. Already back in 1945, as part of his vision for the Automatic Computing Engine, Alan Turing argued that Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability… This process of constructing instruction tables should be very fascinating.

Before the advent of LLMs, the focus of the field was on efficient search techniques that could explore large spaces of possible programs to find one that satisfied a set of requirements. Those tools arose of earlier works in the program synthesis community that aimed to leverage machine learning to help developers to use complex APIs MuraliCJ17a. It has most recently been popularized by Alvin Cheung in an approach known as Verified Lifting, where the goal is to discover a high-level representation that is provably equivalent to an implementation and that can be used to generate a more efficient version of the code.

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